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In the final battle of TBBW Riker prepares the Enterprise to a collision maneuver with the borg cube , apparently in lack of any alternatives
(Wich it is then questionable that he would be able to implement it at all, previously the Enterprise always failed to move when locked by the tractor beam ...)

But considering how the shields work in Star Trek (eg Nemesis) it was plausible that the cube did suffer any damage
(i expect a scene like the episode 10x01 of SG1 "Flesh and Blood" )?

Was this attempt really necessary anyhow?

If the Borg landed on Earth ... nothing prevented the Enterprise to stall the invaders
by bombarding the landing site (always better to lose a city that the entire planet) from a few million km away.


The few thousands Borg on the cube seem to me a little too few to massively invade and conquer an entire planet with billions of people
and the likely large ground forces that would be mobilized in this situation.

Any opinion?

You can't think of the Borg in terms of a conventional army which needs a certain number of soldiers to conquer a given number of civilians.

The Borg don't conquer and occupy. They make you into them. If you beamed 1,000 Borg drones down into a city, ten minutes later you have 2,000 of them. Ten minutes after that you have 4,000... and so on. After a day or two the bulk of the city population is Borg drones, millions of them.

Given this, the Borg should be able to assimilate a planetary population rather quickly. Most people gone in what, a couple of days? Maybe a week? Another few weeks to mop up the stragglers.

As for the Enterprise firing on their ground forces, these would be located in big population centres. I wonder if Riker would have been willing to burn out a chunk of a dozen Earth cities to stop them. And even if he did, if the E-D interfered the cube would have fired on it and that would be that.

You can't think of the Borg in terms of a conventional army which needs a certain number of soldiers to conquer a given number of civilians.

I agree that the borg can not be compared to a normal army (more like the zombies in this), but it is also true that the ground forces should not necessarily engage in battle, or at most engage it just to attract as many single point and then explode (doing it quickly, to avoid defections from assimilation) a few photon torpedo to take out the group (basically sacrificing an army to eliminate the opponent).

they have the entire Earth starfleet's arsenal available.

It is true that transporters and similar technologies (without forgetting the cube in orbit) would certainly complicate this tactic, but the enormous numerical superiority should help them in this (they have numbers to "sacrifice").

Not much trek but in a similar situation I would not see alternatives.

Regarding the Enterprise, the idea would be of hit and run attacks, taking advantage of its greater maneuverability at impulse speed, shoot a couple of torpedoes from far away and get away immediately, possibly at warp speed.

If he could not have stopped the cube, he would have given the fleet time to gather reinforcements.